The Cyberiad is my favourite Lem work. It was the first Lem book I ever read, way back in 1979, and it's been on my bedside table almost non-stop since then. Whenever I'm weary of other books or burnt out from reading software manuals I will pick up The Cyberiad for inspiration and relaxation. How can anyone recover from this weird opening line?...

One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n.

If you can understand the strange appeal of this opening line then you are destined to be a Lem fan. In this book we join the "cosmic constructors" Trurl and Klapaucius as they romp around the universe bumbling their way through gargantuan cybernetic feats. It's a blend of folk stories, fairy tales and mythology mixed with higher mathematics, probability and philosophy. Our constructors are cybernetic machines, which is easily overlooked at times, but it gives the stories an other-worldly feel unlike any other work I have read. Some of the plots include:

• Trurl builds an eight-story thinking machine that insists that 2 + 2 = 7.
• The constructors use "The Garganticus Effect" to divert a war by concatenating the individual soldiers of the opposing armies into gigantic intelligences.
• Trurl builds an electronic poet but finds he has to reproduce most of history since the big bang to get the creative element tuned correctly. Trurl's bard triggers social, scientific and cosmic repercussions.
• The constructors build an algorithmic polymorphic laser-eyed beast to defeat the evil King Krool who has lured them into constructing prey for his hunts.
• Someone is using battery powered probability amplifiers to instantiate dragons and terrify local kingdoms, so our constructors come to suppress the threat.
• Trurl uses the "Big B" (bureaucracy) to help the industrious Steelypips defeat an ugly thing that is bothering them.
• The constructors create a random information generating demon to defeat the Pirate Pugg who seeks to accumulate all knowledge.
• Trurl's own perfection leeds to no good when he creates a tiny artificial kingdom for a cruel exiled king.

This touches on about half of the stories in the book. The other stories are so unconventional that it's very difficult to summarise the plots in a meaningful way in a short space.

The stories in The Cyberiad are the ones that best exemplify the way Lem can be read at many levels. Superficially they could be seen as absurd fairy tales, but lurking beneath are sobering and penetrating metaphors for everything that is important in human science and philosophy. The illustrations of Daniel Mroz that are scattered through the book capture the feel of The Cyberiad wonderfully and a gallery of his hilarious drawings can be found on Lem's web site.

Given that the book was originally written in Polish and translated by Michael Kandel into English, I remain absolutely gob smacked as to how the story of the electronic poet was translated, especially this part where Klapaucius sets a challenge to Trurl's poetry spouting machine:

"Have it compose a poem—a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism and in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!"

"And why not throw in a full exposition of the general theory of nonlinear automata while you're at it?" growled Trurl. "You can't give it such idiotic—"

But he didn't finish. A melodious voice filled the hall with the following:

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed.
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

How on earth was that piece of linguistic gymnastics translated from Polish to English? If anyone knows, please get in touch with me. Update (May 2005) - The answer is below.

Update — April 16th 2003

Thanks to my friend Dave who is living and working in Warsaw with his Polish wife Iza, I now have a copy of the Wydawnictwo Literackie hard cover edition of Cyberiada (in Polish of course).

I can currently only read about 1 word in every 50 of the Polish, but I'm very proud to have an original Polish version of my favourite Lem novel in my collection. Now I have to find a good English-Polish dictionary, or find someone nearby who will give me cheap Polish language lessons!

This book has many more chapters than the English editions. The table-of-contents shows that stories from Mortal Engines open the book, followed by the Cyberiada stories, and it finishes with a few others stories whose titles I am currently unable to match with English equivalents.

Upon receiving the book, I flipped through the pages looking for the famous rhyming six line poem (see above) to see how it appears in Polish. Here it is:

Cyprian cryberotoman, cynik, ceniąc czule
Czarnej córy cesarskiej cud ciemnego ciała,
Ciągle cytrą czarował. Czerwieniała cała,
Cicha, co dzień czekała, cierpiała, czuwała...
...Cyphrian ciotkę całuje, cisnąwszy czarnulę!!

Despite not being able to read the Polish poem, I can tell that Kandel has invented a new poem subject for the English version.

Update - May 28th 2005

Thanks to Michael Kandel who emailed me in April 2005 to tell me how he enjoyed by comments about Lem's works and my praise of his translation of the electronic poet. After overcoming the shock of being contacted by Kandel directly, I replied and asked him how the original Polish poem translated and he supplied the following (but note the comment after the poem):

Cyprian the cyber sex fiend and a cynic, appreciating tenderly the miracle of the dark body of the Negro daughter of Caesar, constantly wove charms with a lemon. She blushed all over, silent, waiting every day, suffering, watching ... Cyprian kisses her aunt, have abandoned the black beauty!

(Of course the paradigms given the machine are quite different.)

A Polish friend pointed out that Michael made a hilarious accidental mistake with one word in the translation. My friend found the Polish word cytrą translated to zither in her dictionary (but I'm guessing the word lyre might also be acceptable). Thanks again to Michael for his legendary Lem translations.

The Star Diaries record the whimsical adventures of Ijon Tichy as he travels crazily through space and time. The stories are in the absurdist style, but nowhere near as abstract and profound as those of the cosmic constructors in The Cyberiad. Our pilot Ijon is very human character who often finds himself to be a normal person in very abnormal circumstances.

The adventures of Ijon are so complex that Lem claims the science of Tichology was created just to map his movements in space and time. A few months ago I saw a challenge on Lem's web site for someone to write Ijon's first adventure, and if you are a true Tichologist then you will understand why this task is on a par with creating a general theory of everything (which one of Ijon's ancestors attempted).

One of my favourite stories is when Ijon's mentor Professor Tarantoga investigates attacks on ships in the commercial space lanes and finds that sentient space-flying potatoes are the perpetrators. In other stories, Ijon tampers with the evolution of a distant planet, he goes squamp hunting on Arduria, he meets himself in a time-loop, he dreams he's Earth's galactic ambassador and finally hallucinates the company of his complete ancestry on a lonely journey.

There is a touching moment in one of Ijon's longest journeys in his rocket where he becomes weary and tired for his home on Earth. He accidentally shakes a tiny pebble of terrestrial soil out of his shoe, and clutching this precious piece of his home world he gains the strength to endure the rest of the journey.

You should read this book while on holiday listening to the gentle whirring of the octopockles.

In July 2002 I was chatting to the chap who runs the fabulous Out There second-hand bookshop in my home suburb of Cheltenham when I mentioned Lem and he said he had two copies of a more recent book by Lem called Fiasco. I instantly purchased both the paperback and hard cover copies for my collection. As a Lem fan I was rather embarrassed to discover there was a Lem book I never knew of. That same evening I went to bed early, made myself very comfortable, adjusted the lighting and carefully began to read my first new Lem book in 15 years.

Warning: Plot spoilers may follow.

I struggled through the first 40 pages of chapter one and stopped, exhausted and disappointed. I felt like I was reading the oldest of old fashioned realistic science fiction. We follow the very, very "dry" adventures of a rescue mission on the icy surface of Saturn's moon Titan. I was reminded of the tedious documentary style of Arthur C. Clark's 3001 The Final Odyssey which I had read a couple of months earlier. In both cases I use the expression "dry" to mean that the descriptions of people and technology are so tediously detailed that it's like reading an edition of Popular Mechanics . It's a coincidence that I had read 3001 a short time before Fiasco, as I will return to making comparisons between them later. Overall, I felt shocked to think that after so many decades of incredible writing style excursions that Lem had returned to the documentary style of his very early works.

Lem had tricked me!...The next night I reluctantly open up chapter two and I find myself in the company of totally different characters in a strange world full of unfamiliar technology. We have jumped into the distant future, I don't know how far, and it doesn't really matter. The book takes on a dreamy quality as complex plans and characters are revealed and we are taken on some excursions into the past. I'm not sure why I'm being taken into stories of the past, but I suspect they are metaphorical and are preparing me for the rest of the book. This appears to be the case, but I'm still not quite sure of how I was prepared or what I was prepared for, and this remains one of the mysteries of Fiasco. The tale of the journey through the sea of termite mounds is particularly strange and disturbing.

We awake in the future on a gigantic exploratory ship being launched on a journey of hundreds of light years to a star with a retinue of 10 planets. The fifth planet called Quinta has been broadcasting incredibly powerful (but chaotic) radio transmissions that must be signs of intelligent life. This is a mission of "first contact". At times Lem returns to the documentary style to describe the computers, propulsion systems and technology of the future, but unlike Arthur C. Clarke's 3001, it never becomes so tedious that it detracts from the story.

Lem likes the themes of detective stories, slowly revealed mysteries and people in extraordinary circumstances, and he draws upon his experience to combine them creatively in Fiasco. When our supremely skilled team of 10 "first contact" specialists arrive at their destination they are unable to establish contact with the Quintans and are confronted with a set of utterly incomprehensible technological mysteries. The planet Quinta is drowned in a cacophony of radio noise, the moon has a flickering plasma ball on its surface, the planet is surrounded by an incomplete ring of ice made by blasting billions of tons of ocean water into space, no moving life is seen on the surface, and they are attacked in a weird and unexpected way. Captain Steerguard asks the question "If you go to visit someone and they will not open the door, do you have the right to blast the door open?". Very slowly the fiasco evolves, but so slowly that it's hard to pinpoint where it starts.

The end of Fiasco is one of the most ambiguous and disturbing that I have read in decades. An emissary is finally sent to the surface of Quinta, but he is confronted with a series of incomprehensible signals and landscapes that are so utterly alien that any similar story of "first contact" pales in comparison. I was so unnerved by the story that I reread the last chapter 3 times in one day, and then decided to read the whole book again a week later. Fiasco made me question the limits of my comprehension and imagination, and Lem deserves admiration for stretching my brain so far.

To return to a comparison: Lem's Fiasco (1988) and Arthur C. Clark's 3001 The Final Odyssey (1997) are both tales of a Rip Van Winkle character thrown into the distant future. As a fan of Kubrick's 2001 and the original short story The Sentinel , I found 3001 to be somewhat insulting to my memory of these earlier works. Clarke has always had a rather dry documentary style of writing, but this style seems to have have become totally fossilised recently. When describing the dislocation of a character thrown into a distant technological future, Lem simply kicks the shit out of Clarke (and it was written 9 years earlier).

After years of searching, this novel finally turned up in Out There bookshop in Cheltenham.

NOTE (26-Dec-2006) - A review of this book is pending.

The paperback cover of Mortal Engines has the sub-title Electronic escapades in the lands of tomorrow. I think this is slightly misleading, and prefer the expression Cybernetic Fairy Tales . Like The Cyberiad, Lem transports our imagination into a universe inhabited by cybernetic beings, but these stories are much closer in spirit to Aesop's fables.

The cover of this paperback portrays the feeling of the early contents wonderfully with an electroknight holding a jousting pole on his cybersteed slaying a robot dragon with a light pistol.

Early in the book Lem weaves fairy tales out of worlds inhabited by beings of frozen gasses, gigantic paranoid computers and dragons that eat moons. The last two stories, The Hunt and The Mask are earlier works, I think, and return to more classical style. In one story a machine hunts a man and in the other, man hunts machine. I suspect that these stories were included by publishers to pad the fairy tale stories out into a suitably sized book.

A Perfect Vacuum (1971) is a book of book reviews of non existent books. What author would be brave enough to produce such a work? In the circuitous introduction Lem even reviews the introduction of the book reviewing itself. Lem describes the creation of A Perfect Vacuum as a liberating experience, freeing the author from the shackles of creative writing. Most impressively, in some cases Lem reviews books that not only do not exist, but could not possibly exist.

Lem, writing about himself writing about himself describes his favourite reviews as the ones that are totally abstract, and his least favourite as the one that is a parody of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Strangely enough, the Joyce parody is one of my favourites, as perhaps the computer programmer inside me is tickled by the idea that the sum total of all human knowledge can be encoded into a literary work like a palimpsest of unlimited depth.

The last reviews are the most complex and dense, wherein Lem explores the concepts of artificial personalities and artificial brains of transcendent power. These themes have been explored by Lem in other works in totally different ways: in The Cyberiad we meet the HPLDs (beings of the Highest Possible Level of Development); in Imaginary Magnitude we learn of a computer of the 18th generation that uses a meta-language incomprehensible to humanity.

Some of the works reviewed could certainly be the seeds of great real books. A Perfect Vacuum is dense and complex to read, but it's a work of stunning originality that is unlike anything else I've ever read, except perhaps Lem's other related work called Imaginary Magnitude (see the next review).

By inspecting the bibliography on Lem's web site and the book cover notes it seems that Imaginary Magnitude is a collection of stories written between 1973-1981. I've always been totally confused by this book...just what is it? The back cover says it's an anthology of introductions to non-existent books, but this was never so obvious to me. In typical Lem style, the introduction is an introduction to introductions. We are then introduced to erotic x-ray photography, bacteria that spell words, literature generated by machines, an advertisement for an extelopedia (a self-updating encyclopedia of the future, with samples) and an audience with a supercomputer called GOLEM XIV which has attained a level of consciousness beyond the understanding of its makers.

Tales of Pirx The Pilot (1968)

I haven't read this collection of 5 short stories for about 15 years now, so details are forgotten. We follow the adventures of the astronaut Pirx in a realistic near future where passenger and transport rockets are flying around the solar system. There are some lovely surreal scenes I recall in the last story Terminus where Pirx is taking a decrepit ship on its last journey to the scrap yards in the company of senile robots, a black cat and some mice.

Return from The Stars (1961)

Also not read for about 15 years. A Rip van Winkle style story of a space traveler who returns home hundreds of years in the future due to relativistic effects during his journey. Bregg finds himself in a totally unfamiliar world populated with a docile and drugged population. The descriptions of 20th century men dealing with the unfamilar future technology, language and customs is reproduced astonishingly well.

The Invincible (1964)

Like the movie Forbidden Planet, a space ship lands on a bleak and distant world to find out the fate of a previous expedition that vanished. The rescue mission is faced with mounting mysteries as they search through the ruins of an incredibly ancient civilisation. They are attacked by metallic "insects" in swarms the size of thunderclouds and eventually discover that the planet hosted the evolution of non-organic life.

This space detective story is quite frightening at times in the horror movie sense, and I keep wondering why no one has picked it up for a movie. Lem's descriptions of the scenery and characters are so vivid that screenwriters would have little more work to do than cut 'n' paste the words from the book straight into a screenplay. Modern CGI effects could recreate the alien world and the epic battles with startling photo realism.

I've just finished rereading Solaris as I write this (August 2002), and I'd forgotten how nightmarish it is. All of the characters are creepy and there is an underlying feeling of dread throughout. I remember when I read Solaris for the first time back in the late 70s I thought it was a bit dull and I couldn't understand why it was the work that seeded Lem's fame. Now, 25 years later, I can see deep questions of philosophy and science buried within the story, and the characters (including the ocean) seemed alive in my imagination. I imagine the strange "feel" of the book would have set it apart in the 60s and attracted the fame that Lem deserved.

Several years after reading the book again I finally managed to see the 2002 movie remake directed by Steven Soderbergh. I haven't seen the 1972 movie by Tarkovsky since 1979 and all I can remember is its ponderous slow pace. Exactly as I expected, the new movie is basically a romance in space that discards all of the mystery surrounding the planet and its ocean. All of the visions and mystery in the novel have been pushed aside for a tediously long and slow exploration of George Clooney's relationship with his resurrected wife. The new movie has a nice menacing atmosphere throughout, but we never see the planet or ocean up close, despite the fact that CGI effects could have done so wonderfully. Nor are theories of the ocean or its influence discussed in any detail. The ambiguous ending is tastefully done, but I think it differs from the book ending.

Philip K. Dick is renowned as the master of stories that blur the line between reality and dreams, but Lem gives him a good run for his money in The Futurological Congress . This is a very black comedy about a dystopian future where life can be short and confused. At some point in the roller-coaster ride of the plot we are no longer sure what is real or what is a drug induced hallucination.

This book could be turned into a fabulous film or TV series, and it would probably finish up like a mixture of Dr. Strangelove, The Matrix and Max Headroom. I recently re-read this book after at least a 10 year gap, and thankfully I had completely forgotten how the story ended. It wasn't until the last few pages that I suddenly remembered the stunning plot twist of the ending which is simultaneously hideous and hilarious. I was reminded partly of the movies They Live (1988) and The Matrix, except of course that Lem, as usual, had given us a vision that surpasses both of those movies.

Anyone who has worked in the public service or the military will surely feel sympathy for our nameless anti-hero as he stumbles through the corridors, levels and departments of a secret Pentagon-like underground military installation called 'The Building'.

Archaeologists of the distant future discover the ruins of the 'The Building' and try to reconstruct what life was like back in the neogene era at the close of the pre-chaotic period.

Beware, as rumours abound of an anti-building.

In 1957 Fred Hoyle wrote the novel The Black Cloud where humanity's "first contact" is with a gigantic nebulous cloud that wanders into our solar system. In 1962 Hoyle writes A for Andromeda where a cosmic message teaches how to build a succession of more complex organic creatures.

Six years later, Lem takes a similar idea to its limits and supposes that the background neutrino radiation of the universe is not just random noise, but it contains information, possibly a message. Scientists try to decode the message, which turns out to be very ambiguous and mysterious. We are left wondering if the universe itself is alive, or we are the victims of a cosmic joke, or perhaps humanity is just plain stupid. As usual, Lem has taken the basic premise that our first contact might be with information (a message) and not living creatures and gives it a fresh spin.

It's a shame that His Master's Voice isn't as well known as Hoyle's earlier works, or the quite similar 1986 Contact by Carl Sagan. Andromeda was turned into a BBC TV science fiction series in 1961 which was quite atmospheric but suffered from a limited production budget. I would love to see a modern remake of Andromeda or His Master's Voice, each of which could make a fine movie or at least a one hour show in the style of the Outer Limits or Twilight Zone.

The introduction explains that this book contains the adventures of Ijon Tichy that appeared in the original Polish version of The Star Diaries but were omitted from the English translation.

These stories are more subdued that those in The Star Diaries, and many are thoughtful discussions about Lem's favourite question "what is life?" framed via meetings between Ijon and various eccentrics and self-professed geniuses that he meets.

There is a side-splitting chapter where Ijon is caught in the escalating battle between two rival washing machine companies trying to produce ever better and smarter models to out sell each other. The last chapter is a great parody of an open letter from conservationists pleading "Let us Save The Universe". After all, how could we live in a universe without creatures like the foul-tailed fetido or the drillbeaked borbit? (see pictures below)

I have not read these 5 stories for at least 15 years, so I can barely recall them. The book is obviously an extension of Tales of Pirx The Pilot (1968). The story The Hunt also appears in Mortal Engines.

The story titled The Inquest was filmed for Polish TV, and I only know this because I watched it by accident one night on Australia's SBS Network back in the mid 1980s. Despite the low budget and subtitles, the story snatched my attention and I watched the whole show. At the end of the show, the credits tell me the story was by Stanisław Lem, so I just about slap myself and think "Of course...I should have recognised the style". I remember there is quite a spooky scene were we are looking through the eyes of a humanoid robot (in recorded playback at the inquest) as it clutches a doorway and the gravity is slowly increasing; "tolerance limits exceeded" it flashes just as our viewpoint crashes away backwards.

Solaris (1961)

Previously reviewed

A Perfect Vacuum

Previously reviewed

The Chain of Chance

It might be 20 years since I've read this story, so all I can remember is it's a detective story about finding the links between what seem to be some unrelated deaths. Were the deaths accidental, deliberate or due to some chain of chance?